We are here to spread love, love through revolutionary anarchism, though veganism, through drug free lifestyles and through living everyday as if it were your last! We took the name Kurohata from a Japanese anarchist journal which was active during the early part of this Century.
We carry the flag which has been carried into many battles, in the Ukraine in 1917, the Spanish revolution of 1936, the Haymarket martyrs died for the flag, Sacco and Vanzetti died for the flag, hundreds and hundreds have died for this flag; we represent those who marched in Seattle, in Genoa, in Rostock and anywhere else where the oppressed rose up against the oppressors, Kurohata is here for you as well as for us.
"Why is our flag black? Black is a shade of negation. The black flag is the negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind.
Black is a mood of anger and outrage at all the hideous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of allegiance to one state or another.
It is anger and outrage at the insult to human intelligence implied in the pretenses, hypocrisies, and cheap chicaneries of governments.
Black is also a color of mourning; the black flag which cancels out the nation also mourns its victims the countless millions murdered in wars, external and internal, to the greater glory and stability of some bloody state.
It mourns for those whose labor is robbed (taxed) to pay for the slaughter and oppression of other human beings.
It mourns not only the death of the body but the crippling of the spirit under authoritarian and hierarchic systems; it mourns the millions of brain cells blacked out with never a chance to light up the world. It is a color of inconsolable grief.
But black is also beautiful. It is a color of determination, of resolve, of strength, a color by which all others are clarified and defined. Black is the mysterious surrounding of germination, of fertility, the breeding ground of new life which always evolves, renews, refreshes, and reproduces itself in darkness.
The seed hidden in the earth, the strange journey of the sperm, the secret growth of the embryo in the womb all these the blackness surrounds and protects.
So black is negation, is anger, is outrage, is mourning, is beauty, is hope, is the fostering and sheltering of new forms of human life and relationship on and with this earth.
The black flag means all these things. We are proud to carry it, sorry we have to, and look forward to the day when such a symbol will no longer be necessary."
